When it comes to Japanese Role Playing Games in North America there are two groups: Square-Enix games and the rest. Atlus has recently pushed for a third group thanks in part to the recent success of their Shin Megami Tensei series of games, more specifically, the last two Persona titles for the PlayStation 2. Riding on the success of those two, they have decided to bring back the 1996 PlayStation original Persona to the PlayStation Portable. Coupled with some changes and retaining the original characters and story elements omitted from the Western Release, long time fans can finally experience how the series from the beginning.
Gameplay
As with typical JRPGs, SMT: Persona revolves around a group of youths who are bestowed the ability to conjure Personas, special God-like creatures that can assist them in battling evil forces. With this ability, these high-school kids will have to fight an evil force that has literally transformed their city into complete disarray and opened a portal to an alternate dimension. There is a lot of mystery and a plethora of different encounters these kids will face.
Without going into too much detail, the story of Persona is fairly engaging thanks to the large group of characters, both those in your group and the array of people who you will bump into along the way. Considering the original title is now more than a decade old, the storyline still feels fresh and works well. The interaction between the characters genuinely feels like they are in high-school. They’ll talk back, discuss current and former crushes and use their fair share of slang and mild curse words.
You would expect that with an interesting story, the combat coupled with it would be fantastic, but this is where the game begins to lose a lot of its momentum and can be quite cumbersome at times.
There is more than one way in which you can deal with the enemies you encounter. The first is of course is your standard combat where your group can either attack, shoot or use Persona skills to defeat foes. With a large catalogue of enemies available, using the proper method will make the difference between a quick, simple battle and a long, drawn out one.
When you trigger one of the many random and story-based battles, you will be thrown into a grid-like battlefield in which you deal with your foes. Each of your characters’ weapons has a certain section of the grid that it can attack. Some weapons, like your Persona skills and most guns have an expansive range but your short-ranged weapons can only attack key areas. What this essentially means is that you not only must you properly equip your group in battle, but you must also place them in the best strategic spot to maximize your attacks.
In practice, this should be a joy and while it does add some skill to how you play, those looking for simple battles will get annoyed by this. What hurts this the most is that in most battles you will not face just one particular enemy but a two or three different types. Because of the various foes, there is no one attack that will easily eliminate all of them in a short amount of time. This forces you to change your tactics mid-battle, thus prolonging your standard random battle to lengths they shouldn’t be.
Your change in tactics might be a simple pause of the battle to move your characters into a different formation or only attacking with certain characters, leaving the rest to defend or act as healers. This wouldn’t be such a problem if you didn’t have to do this with the majority of the fights you encounter. Coupled with the fact that random battles happen at an alarming high frequency, you might just stop playing for a bit due to a number of different emotional factors.
In order to collect additional Personas for your characters to use, you will have to use a different tactic in battle. Rather than fighting, you have the opportunity to ‘talk’ to your enemies in the hopes of either obtaining a spell card that can be used to create Persona, getting them to walk away or to give you an extra bonus. Again, while in practice is a fun idea, getting it to work is often hit or miss.
Each foe has four moods: angry, scared, happy or eager. In order to get them to give you a spell card you need for the enemy to become eager and to give you their card. Because there are so many variables with what your characters can say, unless you use a strategy guide, picking the right commands to say can actually put you in a disadvantage. While only the angry status will put your group in a disadvantage in battle, the likelihood of getting this status is the most likely of the four. It would have been nice to by-pass this feature all together, but obtaining additional Personas is such an important part of the game you have no choice but to go through this in nearly every battle.
The last major issue with the game and one that really feels out of place is that this is both a 3rd person and 1st person RPG. When in rooms and during combat you will play the game from a 3rd person isometric view; while all dungeons and hallways are played in 1st person. You will eventually get used to it, but it still feels really weird due in part to the fact that you will often go from one perspective to the other numerous times along the way.
Graphics and Sound
For a remake, Persona does a few things right but it still can’t hide the fact that it is a 13 year old game. While the new coat of paint is there for the third-person perspective, the game’s city-map is extremely bland and the look while traversing through the areas in first person lacks a lot of detail. Characters and Enemies do look good, but when you spend a good amount of time in first person, you will scream for more variety.
For those who know the Persona series, the use of music has always been a big part of the game. Persona has a very large soundtrack of both lyrical and instrumental music but unfortunately, it is not the game’s strongest point. Specifically the in-game battle music can quickly get annoying due in part to the game’s large amount of random battle. There are also sections with spoken dialog, specifically during cut-scenes which thankfully, are well done and actually help push the story along.
Value
Early on in Persona, there is ability to trigger a key sub-plot called the Snow Queen which was originally removed from the original US PlayStation release. This side-story takes the story in a different direction and adds a significant amount of additional content to an already deep story line. For those completions, you will find plenty of enjoyment trying to unlock all of the available Personas and seeing what else you can ultimately discover.
Conclusion
I had so many mixed emotions playing through SMT: Persona. At times, the story kept me wanting more but the tedious combat, annoying first person perspective and high amount of random battles made me literally drop my PSP in disgust. If this is your first experience with the Persona series, this is not the game to start with; even those who are familiar with the series will probably only enjoy certain aspects offered.
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